Is it bottlenecking?

[Shawn2k5]

Hm I recently put in a new card into my crappy Dimension 2400, but i think the its bottlenecking...

Celeron 2200 Mhz Northwood (400mhz bus speed) (100 FSB)
Dell 0G1548
Kingston 512 DDR PC 3200 (400mhz) Mobo makes it 200....
Nividia GeForce FX5500 v.29 256MB 128-Bit (270 mhz)

The thing is whenever I run a game the CPU is utilized to 100% all the time. At first i thought well thats natural its running a game after all. Then when i ran DS2 i toned down the graphics by turning off some shadowing and other effects, and even put it into 16-bit; however this only yielded a increase of 1 FPS... So my question is.. is it bottlenecking or is that how its suppose to be running with this rig; and would buying a faster processor for this motherboard (it can support upto 3.06 ghz pentiums@533 mhz) yeild far better results? Or would it be better just the scrape the Mobo and buy a better CPU & Mobo combo so it doesnt underclock my RAM? I just want a processor that will be on par with my video card, no more, since im saving up for a new rig. Thanks for looking!

 

[CrossFire851]

It's a celeron, it is not at all ment for gamming. Also the FX5500 is a horible for gamming.

you could use more ram also.

sry to be the one to tell you.

Also you ram is DDR so 200 x 2 = 400 so no worrys there.

You really need a a whole sytem upgrade.

You can get something that can game for around $500 aslong as you use you're currnet parts such as ram, mouse, keyboard, and you're moniture.

But for now I would say buy more ram and a better graphic card.

And to answer you're question You're cpu and you're graphic card is bottlenecking you're gamming experiance.

Also what type of interface is that graphic card? PCI, AGP PCI-e ???? Reply back

 

[Shawn2k5]

Haha yea its PCI. This comp's mobo has no AGP nor PCI-X slot otherwise i woulda went for them. Hrm well if that is the way it is i suppose an upgrade isnt really worth it. I'll just save for an entire new rig. Thanks for the help .

 

[CrossFire851]

np and thank you for taking my comment so nicely. And by the way what games are you trying to play?

 

[Shawn2k5]

Yea i realized this comp sux i didnt buy it; someone else bought it for bro and now im stuck with it since i left my real comp to my other bro... im not trying to play high end games since this comp cant handle em. I just play things like Dungeon Siege 2, Warcraft III, Sims 2, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. It can handle most of those fairly well at 1024x768 & 32bit. DS2 gives me frames of 8-10 fps but its bearable since you can pause the game mid battle and enter commands otherwise i'd be magled to death by skipping frame rate attacks. I want to play Oblivion it looks very intreresting just the game i've been waiting for..., but that'll have to wait till next year when i get my new rig... Im just waiting for the prices of the FX-60 to drop and DX10 Video cards to come out hopefully they make something like a 512 bit memory interface card by then...prolly not tough ...

If DDR2 ram does increase proformance by a ton maybe i'll get a am2 socket and skip the fx-60 but w/e then i'll wait for the next thing.. and the next thing.. and so on... i've been waiting forever to buy a new rig things move too fast... haha

 

[N3051M]

then you'd might as well wait for vista.. intel conros/core/multiprocessors.. amd's new lines.. and the dx10 gfx cards as well.. list is pretty endless